The book contains transliteration, translation, commentary, glossary and facsimiles of all 83 Manichaean fragments of manuscripts in Middle Persian and Parthian discovered at the beginning of the 20th century. in East Turkestan and now stored in the Central Asian collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This is the first edition in Russian of the Western Iranian texts of the collection (Sogdian documents were published by A.N. Ragoza in 1980). The published fragments vary in content - these are cosmogonic and laudatory hymns, excerpts from cosmogonic and dogmatic works, etc. The introduction contains the history of the collection, an essay on Manichaeism and Iranian Manichaean literature, and a description of the content and language of the published texts. The published documents allow us to trace the mutual influence of multilingual versions of Manichaean works and, along with fragments from other collections (primarily Berlin), can be used for the reconstruction and restoration of Manichaean texts. CONTENTS: Introduction 11Discovery of Turfan antiquities. Compilation of the collection of the Central Asian Fund of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Central Iranian languages 11Mani. The origin and spread of Manichaeism 14 Manichaean literature 16 Manichaean doctrine 18 Middle Persian and Parthian Manichaean terminology 22 Contents of fragments of the Central Asian Fund of the Institute of Oriental History of the Russian Academy of Sciences 24 Linguistic features of the fragments 29 Alphabet. Spelling and punctuation of published fragments 32 Conventions 34 Middle Persian and Parthian fragments reproduced in the publication 36 Texts. Transliteration, translation and commentary 41Appendices 93List of abbreviations 94Bibliography 96Glossary 100Dictionary of Manichaean names and terms 117Index 119Index of Manichaean names and terms 119Index of names 121Index of geographical names 122Facsimile 123Summary 159